I'm using the demo on a 12743x4628 16-bit image (what, your camera doesn't take photos that large?) and while the dialog box works perfectly, including zooming in and out, when I click okay, I get an error saying "Could not complete the ContrastMaster 1.0 command because of a program error".

I'm running CS3 Extended on an AMD dual-core with 2GB of RAM and a dedicated drive for Photoshop cache.

There is a bug in the initial ContrastMaster release that is probably causing the mentioned crash. It only happens with large panoramic images. If you are using the ContrastMaster demo version, please download it again to get a fixed version. If you purchased it, please contact me at http://www.thepluginsite.com/about/contact.htm with your order details.

On the other hand your 16bit 60 Megapixel image consumes 360 MB RAM. For processing it you need another 360 MB. ContrastMaster addtionally needs several buffers of the same size again. So the 2 GB RAM could run out fast.

Solitions for memory shortage would be
1. To add more RAM. Under 64bit Vista ContrastMaster can use up to 4 GB RAM and under 32bit XP/Vista it can use up to 3 GB RAM with the /3GB switch.
2. To use only the Dynamic Contrast mode in ContrastMaster which consumes the smallest amount of RAM.
3. To convert the image to 8bit per channel.
4. To create selections and process different parts of the image one after the other. You need to make sure that the selections overlap so that you can blend the border if necessary.